This paper presents a brief survey of the many specifications, languages and standards for database and network communication. Based largely on markup meta-languages, such as the Standard General Markup Language (SGML) and the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), these efforts cover a wide range of industries, applications and functions. All of the projects listed here are presented in more detail elsewhere. The intention of this paper, however, is to provide a simple survey and quick enumeration of the many, varied efforts from across industry. Finally, the diversity and commonality of these initiatives suggest a comprehensive, unified language.
It is the goal of this workshop to bring together researchers from the fields of recommender systems, pervasive computing, mobile computing, urban sensing, social networking, context-aware systems and...